About the company
Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more.
Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totalling over 10 million brokerage accounts.
Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We're deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and the robust infrastructure behind it.
Alpaca is proudly backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator.
Responsibilities
- Lead and develop Platform Engineering & ETL
- Manage leads, set priorities, and ensure delivery.
- Own the Data Lakehouse architecture: Trino, Iceberg/GCS, Airflow, Airbyte, Redpanda CDC, dbt.
- Make build-vs-buy decisions on tooling.
- Drive partner invoicing accuracy and evolution: ensure invoicing logic is versioned, reproducible, and scales with new pricing mechanisms and product launches.
- Deliver embedded analytics: expose warehouse data to partners via BrokerDash, SSR pipelines, and API-based reporting. Own row-level security and entitlements.
- Support product launches with data change management: coordinate data impact analysis for new products (fixed income, global stocks, perps, 24/5 trading) across downstream datasets, dashboards, and reverse ETL.
- Accelerate self-service: move the organization toward self-serve analytics via semantic layers, data catalogues, and conversational BI so the data team can shift from ad-hoc queries to strategic projects.
- Guide AI/ML enablement: oversee enterprise AI search, agent-based workflow automation, and LLM-powered analytics. Help balance vendor solutions with in-house development.
- Collaborate with Finance, Sales, Product, Compliance, and Customer Success to translate business needs into data products.
- Manage infrastructure costs: keep data + cloud cost ratio under target as AUC grows.
- Operate production systems: own on-call processes, incident response, and SLOs for data freshness, accuracy, and availability.
Requirements
- 8+ years in data engineering, including 3+ years managing data teams (leads + ICs).
- Deep experience with modern data stack: dbt, Trino/Presto or equivalent query engines, Apache Iceberg or similar table formats, cloud object storage.
- Hands-on experience with ETL/ELT patterns at scale: CDC (Debezium/Kafka), batch (Airflow/dbt), streaming, and reverse ETL.
- Track record of building self-service analytics capabilities for non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience with financial data: trading, invoicing, revenue attribution, or regulatory reporting in fintech or financial services.
- Proficiency in Python and SQL. Comfortable reading code, reviewing PRs, and making architecture decisions.
- Experience managing distributed/remote teams across multiple time zones.
- Strong stakeholder management: you can translate between executive priorities and engineering execution.
- Experience with GCP (GKE, GCS, BigQuery migration), Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform.
Conditions
- Competitive Salary & Stock Options
- Health Benefits
- New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
- Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card